Shortly before he was born, a colleague asked how I was feeling about becoming a parent.

Resolved, I answered. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know it will challenge me. And I intend to rise to this challenge as best I can.

When I think about the arc of my life, that journey from an old Toyota truck on LA freeways to a Washington Heights apartment with a small family, I think sometimes about distinct chapters: the chapter in my life called in-unit laundry, the chapter of my life called Central Park.

In the darkened hall, a city-block wide, tourists and ballerinas sit on the floor, do push-ups, throw their arms back, as their images are recorded on the floor and tethered drones whirr overhead.

This is what Ai Weiwei and Herzog and de Meuron named “Hansel and Gretel” and ostensibly freighted with the message that Surveillance Is Bad.

What this installation inadvertently pre-supposes is: maybe surveillance can be fun too?

The cameras, constantly tracking viewers, photographing them at intervals, and projecting their images constantly on the floor, turned everyone in the space into performers. The effect is less chilling than it is joyful.

In Part 2 of the piece, the standard agitprop about military drone strikes, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden is transmitted via iPad. Also on this iPad are access to live video feeds from cameras at the exhibit, in grainy black and white, handled via YouTube.

As I left the building, I observed behind a desk a video monitor, showing color feeds from other cameras still. And here is where the failure of the piece was most clearly rendered, in its unwillingness to truly expose the backstage of surveillance: to show the chain of custody for the video recordings of the Armory gift shop. To identify and feature the private security agency charged with responding to incidents they observe through video surveillance. To show how data from website visits is matched up to live visitor data in order to create what we in the business call “omnichannel journeys.” To outline in plain terms how my credit card information, used to pay the $17 admission, might be used in other ways, the agencies of anonymous white-collar workers who will receive that information, bundle it, return it to the artist for re-publication.

Surveillance without threat is just photography, and the massive funhouse mirror is really just fun.

Surveillance, conflated with voyeurism, requires multiple parties. Rather than implicating any party directly in the spotlight, it fails to do more than gesture in the direction of a seemingly unknowable monster with unlimited reach.

Perhaps the more concerning and perhaps unspoken thing about surveillance is that it has proven to be genuinely helpful. Photographic surveillance is one species of the photography family, with its applications in art and its use as a freezer of memory. In final images of Princess Diana and Dylan Klebold we see examples of how artifacts of surveillance and emotionally fraught snapshots can be conflated.

In the age of emails, metadata is a useful tool for verifying the veracity of an otherwise anonymous party in a two-way communication. In the prosecution of a crime, it can bear witness.

What threatens Hansel and Gretel is not the abstract presence of The State, but the direct threat of the wolf. Though the two can overlap, they do not overlap enough in this experience to deliver the message that Surveillance Is Bad. They do not introduce any new information to augment our fears of the state.

It is live photography, a funhouse mirror at its most joyful. But that wasn’t supposed to be the point.

The thing about art about surveillance as voyeurism: the audience knows they are being watched in that moment, but without any concrete, immediate truth to the questions of “by whom” and “why,” does being watched really matter?

Here is New York

1. Move to New York City. Preferably Manhattan.

2. Go to a bar during a daylight hour, by yourself. A wasteful, decadent one. Order a drink.

Resist the temptation to smile from heartbreak. At what this city was, and what it still is.

Rising tension, three parts

What the Justin Bieber remix of “Despacito” and Dunkirk have in common: summer pop featuring three parts, interwoven in constant, rising tension, until the ticking of the watch stops, this is how we do it down in Puerto Rico, only to build again till the credits roll.

Songs of Summer

I haven’t made a mix CD in a long time, but the two songs that sit at the ends of a bipolar magnet in my head, both opening and closing a mix that seems too obvious for a technology practitioner in his mid-30s, c. 2017: LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” and Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.”

The Half-Life of Wonder

How to calculate the half-life of wonder, at The Met:

At the Rei Kawakubo exhibit – Art of the In-Between – line up next to a fairly mundane piece, a proportion play in Prince of Wales check, for ten minutes or so. Watch a pair of middle-aged American tourists arrive, snicker “weird,” and leave. Wait till the next pair arrives, a father and young daughter.

“Juicero raised nearly $120M from well-known investors before shipping a single unit. The team spent over two years building an incredibly complex product and the ecosystem to support it. Aside from the flagship juice press, Juicero built relationships with farmers, co-packing/food-processing facilities, complex custom packaging, beautifully designed mobile/web applications, and a subscription delivery service. But they did all this work without the basic proof that this business made sense to consumers.”

Merits posting here (as opposed to all the other news roiling me) since it has some professional value as a lesson in evaluating business strategy before going headlong into an expensive design and development process. The constant references to custom, machined parts lead me to a preliminary rating of the Juicero about on par (on the Jives scale of product design genius) with the beautifully squalid NeXT cube.

Also: if after eight revisions of this shit you’re still carving Arial into aluminum you’re not thorough enough. System fonts carved into metal are to me what brown M&M’s were to Van Halen: a tell-tale sign that something is amiss.

Related: I get a similar high off similar misfires chronicled by Internet of Shit.

Jeni’s Ice Cream, my current favorite purveyor of frozen dairy confections, has outdone themselves with their “spring 2017 collection.” Beyond the palette-extending selection of flavors, Jeni Britton Bauer has done a brilliant number to extend and elevate the very idea of how ice cream can be packaged and sold.

As a collection.

It follows logically. High-end food, like most fashion, is seasonal: some ingredients are better at different times of year, and that affects menus and availability. Jeni’s takes this a step further by applying the same conceptual layer at which even mid-level fashion brands excel: quoting from across art forms to derive a loftier lineage for their aesthetic ideas.

Further, for a series of flavors that might be considered quirky or unconventional at first glance, the conceptual statement of purpose (which name-checks Virginia Woolf and Tilda Swinton) elevates these flavors to being necessarily adventurous in a contemporary social context. While none of these flavors are Filipino, I know well what it means to live on the fringes of others’ comfort levels with food. And it’s why I value endeavors that play with the tension of comfort (in the guise of a favorite dessert) and discomfort (a range of esoteric flavors) at the highest levels of quality.

This year, with our spring 2017 collection, we’re asking questions about openness and community. What does it take to befriend a stranger? We’re calling this collection We’re Not From Here. You Belong Here. These flavors may sound unfamiliar on the outside, but are meant to be extraordinarily (or ordinarily) familiar on the inside to an American palate.

I love love love ice cream. (There is even a category of this oft-neglected blog called (with broad intent) “ice cream for everyone.”) Throughout my adult life, I maintained a reputation for keeping at least a half-dozen flavors of ice cream on hand at all times. I have never denied ice cream when it was offered to me because I was afraid that it would not be offered to me again.

And with this statement – this collection – Jeni’s has inspired in me for the first time a desire for a specific experience of ice cream. And they have given me an aesthetic framework through which to enjoy and critique them.

I can’t wait to try them all (especially genmaicha & marshmallows – two things I can’t resist are green tea ice cream and Rice Krispies treats).

Among the two books I am reading in parallel are Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark and Jarrett Kobek’s I Hate The Internet, which, as I bounce between their narratives, I realize render so much of what it means to be (as I am) a liberal technologist living in America in 2017.

Solnit’s writing is symphonic in its range of sources. Kobek’s style leans on an acerbic but incisive wit – his consistent description of the amount of “eumelanin in the basal cell layer” of a character’s epidermis has shades of Vonnegut’s “So it goes.”

And Solnit is a hard read now. I want to feel as hopeful as she did in the context of the first term of the second Bush administration, when she looked to the evolution of Uruguayan politics for inspiration to get through a dark time.

There’s so much on my mind these days it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ve done some good things recently, which I’ll write about in greater detail shortly. But work continues, life continues, and good prose lifts my spirits. Somewhere between hope and hate, I suppose.

What world is this that the detritus of a flying machine that once traversed the skies at Mach 0.74 is a piece of retro-chic furniture? One look at this ridiculous chair and I think about curling up in it as “O Superman” plays through a decent pair of headphones.

First there was this beautifully photographed survey, to remind me how singular the City Bakery coffee cup is, how brilliant an artifact of caffeine consumption. These cups can be so loaded with meaning that it was important enough for Christina and me to spring for the iconic “We Are Happy To Serve You” cups for drinks served at our own wedding.

And then there is its obliging companion: the plastic gateway that tends to be the drinker’s interface with the cup. Cups are all style – branded vessels in standard sizes, differentiated by color and typography. But lids are functionally differenthumble masterpieces in a way that cups almost never dare to be. Lids are circular wireframes, down to microcopy (CAUTION CONTENTS HOT).

What half-awake studies of user experience design we could have, starting at $1.

The podcast is a fascinating entrée into the peculiar “ethnic pastiche” genre of architecture. Though the New York article says “the Chinatowns of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. … have been reduced to ethnic theme parks,” the interesting flipside is that in San Francisco, being an ethnic theme park was kind of the point.

On yet another flipside/potential ouroboros tip: This book (which has been on my wishlist for years) covers the phenomenon of Chinese mimicry of Western architecture. And, much like fortune cookies, the distinct architectural styles of American Chinatowns are Western.

I’ve read a lot of defenses and descriptions of hyperlinks, but this may be the most poetic:

But hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: they are its eyes, a path to its soul. And a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage – and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web.

Part prescient critique, part nostalgic complaint; a little glib and a lot biased – but Hossein Derakhshan’s essay is in the ballpark of righteousness. He benefits from the unique position of having held a measure of power through the ’00s and having no access to the internet at all during Facebook’s empire-building of the last seven years: it allows him to see the present social network platform oligarchy as a whole and strange thing.

Also, though his essay skids off the rails after this section, this bit is totally real – emphasis mine:

Fewer users are directly checking dedicated webpages, instead getting fed by a never-ending flow of information that’s picked for them by complex and secretive algorithms.

As I am now really teaching people how to (learn how to) design, I thought to go back to a conversation I had with Carlos last year when he shared a link to the The Manifesto Project on my Facebook timeline. What follows, I realize, has held as my own design manifesto of sorts for at least the last 18 months:

I’m finding more often that design is less a matter of visual style and more about paying attention. Most of the time, the more details that show the decision of a designer to focus the user of an object on the purpose(s) of that object, the better the object serves its user, and therefore, the better the design. Therefore, I’ve been less likely to recommend reading the writings of other designers, lest novices confuse that designer’s aesthetics with their processes.

Where I would start, with a literate audience, is poetry. Start with a haiku. This is the smallest possible object to ‘design,’ and everybody has the tools. Then ask: Why this word and not that word? Why this inflection and not that one?

Get a young designer to think this way, then have them use their phone, their car, their shoes. Successfully honing a design sensibility, in my judgment, is getting that person to look at an object and think, Why this material and not that one? Why this color and not that one? Why this position 35 cm away and not that position 40 cm away? And so on, throughout every syllable of their experience.

Like a diatribe on the Happy Meal extracted from True Detective, it’s not hard to imagine some of Helen Rosner’s passages drawled by a latter-day Matthew McConaughey:

Perfection is a precarious state. It occupies a narrow peak, the very pinnacle of the mountain. By its very nature, perfection leaves no room for wildness or risk. Perfection is passive, it’s static, it verges on bland. It’s a circle. A cloudless sky. An unmarked page. It’s everything and it’s nothing, and it’s glorious, and it usually comes with fries.

It’s true that ribeyes and oysters and even pizza and tacos share a soothing simplicity, but nothing is more nothing than a chicken tender.

Food means more than it used to—what we do with it means more. Picking this restaurant or that bunch of carrots isn’t just a decision of interest or appetite; it’s telling a story, it’s choosing a tribe.

I am not ashamed to say that I indulge in chicken tenders, though I disagree with Rosner’s dismissal of panko as a breading ingredient and her disdain for dipping sauces. At home, I dredge my chicken in a mix of flour and panko, and I serve them topped with freshly grated parmigiano reggiano and a dipping sauce of equal parts Huy Fong sriracha sauce and Heinz ketchup. I’ll often eat them with white rice but find their ideal complement in a scoop of Hawaiian mac salad or a homemade Cæsar salad. It’s all very fancy, to be sure.

My recipe aside, the essay itself is sublime. Much like a plate of chicken tenders, I personally find it pretty satisfying (fully aware that others don’t), but I’m never quite sure if it’s meant to be taken totally seriously. The tone of its prose and its publication in Guernica lend the dish a heretofore unknown gravity, though it’s not unearned: perhaps the most confounding assertion in the piece is that chicken tenders only reached ubiquity in the 1990s. The very idea of breaded-and-fried chicken tenderloins seems so elemental to my palette that it astounds me to think that Auguste Escoffier’s codification of mother sauces predates it by at least three generations.

At a wedding Christina and I attended last year, as we dined on what we now recognize as the standard “wedding meal” – a mixed green salad, a pretty-if-unsatisfying course of protein, and a buckshot-patterned buffet of desserts (ordered by stationery several months in advance) – one of the children at the next table was served a plate of chicken tenders with a pile of fries. Rosner knows exactly how we felt in that moment:

Their ubiquity on kids’ menus isn’t a mark against their perfection, but rather proof of it: the kids’ menu is where all perfect foods live. Pizza, hot dogs, spaghetti. But king of all perfect foods is the chicken tender.

Instead, I find myself pretty consistently in awe of other parts of their business model. Their plate marking system is a remarkably economic form of workflow management. The Waffle House index is a real FEMA scale for evaluating the severity of damage from a natural disaster.

And today, I picked up this piece in the Atlantic CityLab on their iconic architecture, interior design, and typography – and how a new location on Canal Street in New Orleans is slated to diverge from it by replacing the “ubiquitous yellow band” with “a ‘bistro courtyard’ encircled by a wrought-iron fence,” “stucco and brownish brick on the outside, and a gate next to the parking lot.”

I would say that consistency is more important than cleverness. Consistency is actually really hard to achieve. Cleverness is a cheap commodity.

And he continues:

You get distinctiveness by doing anything. Then if you wanted to make it memorable and appropriate, making that point of distinction plausibly mean something is the next step.

That distinction, in the case of Waffle House, probably has a lot to do with this (from this Journal article):

The Waffle House, which spends almost nothing on advertising, has built a marketing strategy around the goodwill gained from being open when customers are most desperate.

Though I have not been affected by natural disasters these last ten years, those eleven yellow tiles hovering in the air at the turnpike’s edge have come to mean a lot to me – and it would seem to other people too. It meant (among other things) that on a Saturday morning as I’d had a two-hour nap and Christina’s alertness was fading, we knew where we could stop for a cheap, hot breakfast – two more hours till we arrived in the future.

So I came across the Spotify “Coolness Spiral of Death” dataviz last week and thought that it was clever and well-conceived, but I didn’t pay much attention otherwise. Then I queued up Rdio, half-heartedly thumbed through their recommendations, and settled into the new Blur album. While I’m really enjoying it – “Ong Ong” is a fun single with a kind of Vampire Weekend ragged playfulness about it – I’m also basically admitting that Spotify’s hypothesis is true.

From the blog post:

Two factors drive this transition away from popular music.

First, listeners discover less-familiar music genres that they didn’t hear on FM radio as early teens, from artists with a lower popularity rank. Second, listeners are returning to the music that was popular when they were coming of age — but which has since phased out of popularity.

I agree with both of these points, especially vis-a-vis my undying fondness for Britpop.

Also in there somewhere: the words taste freeze to describe the phenomenon, which sounds delicious.

I have to wonder: would 21-year-old me have been into The Magic Whip as much as I was 13 or even Think Tank? Would their newest album have have appealed to me in college, or have Blur aged as much as I have – do musicians and artists also calcify as they get older and have children, therefore always predisposed to producing new material in lockstep with the tastes of their original fans?

Who knows. Anyway, I’ve also been coming back to Oasis recently, specifically the mournful “I’m Outta Time” – it came on the house Sonos while Josh was in town and when he started mouthing the chorus, I was surprised that he knew the song too. We agreed it was by far the best song on a mixed bag of an album – and easily their best song of the 21st century.

Given my tastes, who’s to say I ever was in the center of the so-called coolness death spiral, even in my youth. (At that time, I also admired people whose musical tastes went farther afield than mine.) It’s entirely possible I’m closer to the center now – pop and rap are now parts of my musical diet in a way they weren’t in my early twenties. But it’s true I’ve gotten more sure in my knowledge of what I’ll enjoy.

Another way to look at it: I know what I like, and I know my safe harbors more than I ever did before. And those aren’t bad things, per se. Besides, at my minimum weight and maximum hairline, being cool is quite thoroughly through with me.

I had a dream where I was talking to someone about my theory that Mr. Wilson in Dennis the Menace is really Dennis from the future who lives next door and endures the young boy’s hijinx because he must ultimately serve as his/their protector.

If you wish to protect your car from theft, I suggest you could do better than to equip it with an alarm that inspires in your neighbors a desire for your car and its infernal refrain to be vanquished forever.

Two articles I read today have me thinking about my social status and the cost of my daily conveniences:

“I was an undercover Uber driver” in the Philadelphia CityPaper is one of the more humane descriptions of the true cost of a $5 livery ride. Emily Guendelsberger’s prose is accessible and the charts are legible. Particularly good though is her use of the word caste here: it affects both self-awareness and reinforces her findings regarding UberX’s broad societal effects.

And then there’s this article, also anecdotal but even more scathing. It’s more nakedly concerned with race as a factor in gentrification and income inequality. The money quote, screencapped and highlighted all over Twitter, is worth dropping in its entirety here:

We just did a place on Nostrand Avenue. People are not even there yet. We put in $600,000 and everyone was laughing at us. “It’s crazy, you’re over there. A building for yuppies, white people? It’s not going to work.” The building was full of tenants — $1,300, $1,400 tenants. We paid every tenant the average of twelve, thirteen thousand dollars to leave. I actually went to meet them — lawyers are not going to help you. And we got them out of the building and now we have tenants paying $2,700, $2,800, and they’re all white. So this is what we do.

Emphasis mine: it’s worth teasing out who, to this speaker – the young Hasidic hustler – are people?

One of the many tweets linking to this article contained my first observed instance of the phrase plaid-collar migration, which is a fine, fine description of young, rich millennials earning a mint in the slab-desked open offices of “digital product development” in this city.

As I’ve grown more affluent and ascended into the plaid-collar caste, I’m finding myself more often on the bad side of these things, taking Uber rides to my apartment in a gentrifying slice of uptown Manhattan. I’m not the one doing harm per se but am clearly benefiting from harm visited upon others. It is an uncomfortable position, and I don’t know how just yet to move from it.

Tonight I’ve done something I haven’t done in years: worked on a design for which I was accountable to no one.

Inspired by a colleague’s homework assignment for her basic typography class at SVA, I decided to create a new cover for one of my favorite books: Arcadia.

It’s a book I first bought at a used bookstore in Philadelphia, read annually from 2006–12, and have given at least twice as a gift. Every time I’ve read or gifted this book, this is what the cover looked like.

This is what I am thinking it could look like:

In my version, there are a couple of plays on the title at work. The obvious one is that the title of the play on the cover circles back on itself: the ‘A’ at the 12 o’clock position is highlighted in pure white to demarcate it as the beginning and end (the rest of the letters are set in a pale grey).

The second play is in the conceptual connection I wanted to create between the text and the cover design through the selection of typefaces: the word ‘Arcadia’ is set in two related typefaces, alternating letter-by-letter. They are:

Mrs. Eaves: designed in the 1990s by Zuzana Licko, it was an homage to Baskerville and named for John Baskerville’s wife and aide.

Much like the structure of the play, alternating between 1809 and the 1990s, the title of the play on the cover imperceptibly alternates between two related typefaces from the 18th century and the 20th century. To make the distinction between these two more clear – to telegraph the obscure punchline – I set “Tom” in Baskerville and “Stoppard” in Mrs. Eaves.

The back cover extends the concept:

Here, text is set in Caslon, a quintessential English serif designed in the 1600s by William Caslon. Baskerville was designed with the idea of improving upon Caslon (like Sidley Park, the play’s setting, subject to a redesign in 1809).

The image that spans across the cover is an image called (fittingly) The Hermitage, painted by an unknown artist, dated 1772. It’s pretty literal, but I think the typography concept is high-brow enough to draw out some of the text’s themes to the point that the cover’s imagery can simply be a painting of an English country house.

The Faber & Faber branding is all taken from their website. I think this qualifies as fair use but am open to having my interpretation questioned.

Download the full cover as a PDF if you’re interested in seeing how it all works together. It includes the spine, where ‘Arcadia’ is set in the same alternating typefaces but in a straight line that hopefully addresses some of the obvious legibility issues.